Design Corps supports the vital role that design can play in addressing critical issues and needs of communities. Through the Social Economic Environmental Design (SEED) initiative, Design Corps provides communities, institutions and design professionals with the tools and services they need to integrate community-engaged processes into design activities, leading to projects that reflect a community's values and cultural identities. Public inclusion as a "best practice" in design is...
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- Position Vacancy for Assistant Controller
- Pratt Center Report Recognizes Brooklyn Navy Yard As National Model for Economic Development
- Surdna Foundation Announces Appointments of Four New Staff Members
- Leticia Peguero Named Executive Director of Andrus Family Fund and Andrus Family Philanthropy Program
- Let Us Build Cully Park! Eco-District Approach to Community Rebuilding
Letter from the President
Dear Partners, Colleagues, and Friends,
When I arrived here two years ago, I was amazed at the great work the Surdna Foundation had supported and the important achievements accomplished with the Foundation's investments in areas as diverse as climate change, transportation, arts training, youth organizing, public media, and community development. I came to Surdna after spending more than 15 years focused on international learning and exchange, which meant that while I'd worked on many of the same issues Surdna had been investing in, I hadn't had the good fortune to work closely with Surdna. It really was a revelation to learn just how powerful and effective the Foundation had become over its more than nine decades of grantmaking. However, I also realized that my arrival allowed us to take a fresh look at what the Foundation could do to extend this run of excellent philanthropy.
As we thought about the next chapter in Surdna's work, we decided fairly early on that we wanted to focus on just and sustainable communities, a theme that had been present in our previous work, but not raised up as a central point of emphasis. We saw an opportunity through this sharpened focus to align our work, bringing all of Surdna's considerable assets to bear in fostering the development of communities where all residents can thrive. We wanted to see cities where high-speed rail and buses connect people to good paying jobs. We wanted to see communities where culture is celebrated as a core asset at the heart of a community's identity and not an afterthought. We wanted to help find ways to make the theory of a carbon-free society into a practical and achievable reality for communities across the United States.
Surdna Foundation board and staff have worked for more than a year on the development of an updated Foundation mission and new grantmaking strategies that reflect the vision of creating just and sustainable communities. As we applied this vision to our work, we came to see a sustainable community as a place that uses innovation to secure a sustainable environment over the long term, a place that enables the establishment of a strong and resilient local economy, and a place that celebrates a vibrant cultural life for all community members, regardless of background. We also affirmed the importance of social justice and of youth empowerment and engagement in service to the mission as core concepts to apply to our work going forward.
Our confidence in this way of thinking about our work was bolstered by what we were seeing out in the field. For example, our concerted efforts in older industrial cities over the past several years has helped us see how critically important it is to initiate change from several angles-be that helping those who are building community voice in an impoverished neighborhood, or working with the mayor to see a new vision for transit-oriented development, or being an ally to local foundations who want partners to help build momentum toward change. Or in New Orleans, a place where we have been working intensively for the past several years, and where we have seen that the incredible cultural roots of the city have galvanized interest in the city's social, economic, and political renewal at a level that simply isn't possible in most places. Or even in our longstanding work on national transportation reform, where we've seen a remarkable uptick in interest and support because people are beginning to see that transportation systems really are the backbone of the community, and that if we get transportation wrong we will never be able to achieve the kind of equitable, vibrant and economically prosperous community we aspire to build.
To reflect our understanding of a just and sustainable community as one that must be built on an interconnected set of systems, we are launching three new program areas-Sustainable Environments, Strong Local Economies, and Thriving Cultures. These programs replace the five programs that have been in place at Surdna over the past decade, though we will be integrating several elements of our former programs into these new programs. While reflective of the accomplishments of the Foundation over the past 92 years, the new programs represent the start of an exciting new era in our work.
While many of our longstanding grantees will continue to be important partners in our work, we will be exploring work with many new grantees through these new program areas, and all of our grantmaking recommendations will be guided by our new mission to foster just and sustainable communities. In addition, we will continue to make a series of grants to support the important non-profit community infrastructure that serves foundations and non-profits alike.
Work is ongoing at the Foundation to sharpen our grantmaking strategies within and across the new programs, and as new grantmaking guidelines are developed over the next several months, they will be posted on our revamped Web site, www.surdna.org.
The work we have chosen to undertake at Surdna, helping those who are building the communities of tomorrow, is essential to the future prosperity of our society. We will not sit by and watch as our atmosphere is forever altered due to our unfettered consumption of fossil fuels, as the poor in our communities get left farther behind, or as innovation is stifled by the interests of the status quo. But overcoming these challenges will take much more than the efforts of the Surdna Foundation. Our success depends on the highly effective institutions and people we work together with. We look forward to facing the future with partners like you at our side.
Sincerely,
Phillip Henderson
President
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Jobs
Director of Communications
The Surdna Foundation seeks a Communications Director to lead all internal and external communications activities of the Foundation.
Click here for details.
Assistant Controller
Surdna seeks an Assistant Controller, with an emphasis on investment analysis, that reports directly to the Chief Financial Officer and coordinates with the Human Resources and Administrative Manager. The position will add value and additional control over financial, investment, and administrative operations.
Click here for details.
Program Director, Strong Local Economies
The Surdna Foundation seeks a Program Director for its grant making program, Strong Local Economies. This is an extraordinary opportunity to join a respected and innovative foundation as it begins a new chapter in its long and successful history. In October, 2009, the Foundation adopted a new mission – to foster just and sustainable communities in the United States -- and launched three new program areas: Sustainable Environments, Strong Local Economies and Thriving Cultures.
Reporting to the President and working closely with board committees and staff, the Program Director for Strong Local Economies will sharpen the current program strategies for this new area, will develop new initiatives or themes that are consistent with the mission, and will deepen institutional knowledge in the program’s areas of focus in order to ensure maximum impact of Foundation dollars. The program will build on and integrate many elements of the Foundation’s former work in community revitalization and will work quite closely with the environment and culture programs.
Click here for full details and how to apply.
A Labor Perspective on COP 15
by David Foster, Executive Director, Blue Green Alliance
Copenhagen, COP 15 1, was my fourth United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change conference and provided quite a contrast from COP 11 in Montreal in 2005. That year I was the only representative of U.S. labor with an interest in supporting the UN process. By comparison, in 2009, the seven Blue Green Alliance union partners sent 28 representatives, including two national presidents, Terry O'Sullivan from the Laborers' International Union of North America, and Mike Langford of the Utility Workers Union of America. The rest of the delegation included ranking officers and high-level staff of the United Steelworkers, Service Employees International Union, American Federation of Teachers, Communications Workers of America, and Amalgamated Transit Union.
From a lonely voice of one in 2005, U.S. labor is now giving its full-throated support to the importance of an international climate treaty that delivers a new generation of clean energy jobs. At COP 15, Blue Green Alliance played a visible role conducting two side events, one, explaining the necessary elements of effective climate legislation in the U.S. and the second, on building long-term labor-environmental partnerships. We also reached out to the U.S. negotiators and congressional staff meeting frequently to share with them the important interests of working families in the Copenhagen negotiations. We concluded our COP activities by hosting an international labor-environmental reception that brought together hundreds of labor and environmental NGO representatives from around the world. The highlight of the evening was the presence of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the U.S. House delegation, and Nancy Sutley, Chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality.
So what were the lessons of COP 15? Many of our European labor colleagues were deeply disappointed by the failure of COP 15 to reach binding emissions targets and an enforceable global treaty. But from the perspective of evaluating the trajectory of the international climate debate, COP 15 represented another step forward in our collective effort to transform our global economy.
The U.S. had been essentially absent from the climate debate since the U.S. Senate voted against Kyoto more than a decade ago. I remember the disengaged negotiators who represented the U.S. at Poznan in 2008. And in the absence of the U.S., expectations on how and when the global economy could be transformed became divorced from the reality of what was politically achievable in the U.S. Congress. In much of the rest of the world, and in Europe in particular, inflated expectations accompanied the election of Barack Obama. Having watched the struggle to pass The American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES) in the U.S. House, I knew better.
Consequently, I left Copenhagen, sobered by the difficulties that lie in front of us to achieve a global agreement, but distinctly proud that President Obama had played a constructive role by bringing together the voices of Brazil, South Africa, China and India with the U.S. to codify the actual state of climate negotiations. Going into 2010 each country can now focus clearly on its own responsibilities to solve the climate crisis instead of obscuring those responsibilities behind the UN process. The economic transformation to a clean energy economy places difficult choices in front of every government. Yes, Europeans were disappointed, but they were also failing to read the political situation for what it was - a relatively conservative U.S. Senate and several powerful developing world economies which were demanding a different seat at the table.
The important lesson from COP 15 is that every country must now step up to the responsibilities that its own emissions create in a global economy. For those of us from the U.S. it means, first and foremost, passage of comprehensive climate change legislation in the U.S. Senate that commits us to reducing our carbon emissions by at least 80 percent by 2050 regardless of the status of a global treaty.
Some would argue that we can't take such a step and need to wait until we reach global consensus. But waiting in these circumstances condemns us to perpetual inaction. Passage of domestic legislation by the U.S. would break the international logjam.
Others argue that unilateral action would leave U.S. businesses at a competitive disadvantage. But the U.S. House ACES bill provides us with the answer to that argument. Under its provisions, the U.S. would initiate its own cap on carbon emissions and, if other countries refused to take similar actions, would implement a series of border adjustments on the products of energy-intensive industries to prevent carbon leakage - the migration of those industries to countries without similar costs.
COP 15 may have closed the door on one chapter of our pursuit of a clean energy economy, but it also opened the next one and put the responsibility directly on our shoulders. While the threats of climate change are significant to our economy, the opportunities to create a whole new generation of jobs are just as great.
That's why steelworkers look to climate change solutions to put them back to work making steel for wind turbine towers and aluminum cable for new transmission lines.
That's why laborers look forward to working in a new high-wage weatherization industry, employing a million workers, weatherizing every home in America.
That's why transit workers expect to move millions of Americans from home to work and back again on thousands of miles of new light rail systems.
And it's why labor showed up in force at COP 15.
1COP 15 is the 15th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change held in Copenhagen in December 2009.
David Foster is the Executive Director of the Blue Green Alliance, a national partnership between labor unions and environmental organizations dedicated to expanding the number and quality of jobs in the green economy. Click here for David's bio.
Statements and opinions expressed in these articles are solely those of the author or authors and may or may not be shared by the Surdna Foundation.
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